How to format your references using the Visual Neuroscience citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for Visual Neuroscience. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Download the output style file
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Rotblat J (2000). Mark Oliphant (1901-2000). Nature 407, 468.

A journal article with 2 authors

Gano S & Kinzler R (2011). SPORE series winner. Bringing the museum into the classroom. Science 331, 1028–1029.

A journal article with 3 authors

Li S, Matthews J & Sinha A (2008). Atmospheric hydroxyl radical production from electronically excited NO2 and H2O. Science 319, 1657–1660.

A journal article with 20 or more authors

Kaina N, Dupré M, Lerosey G & Fink M (2014). Shaping complex microwave fields in reverberating media with binary tunable metasurfaces. Sci Rep 4, 6693.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Sigrist J-F (2015). Fluid-Structure Interaction. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Chichester, UK.

An edited book

Wiesel SW & Delahay JN eds. (2011). Essentials of Orthopedic Surgery, 4th edn. Springer, New York, NY.

A chapter in an edited book

Andreo RB (2013). Bringing Out Faint Large-Scale Structure. In Lessons from the Masters: Current Concepts in Astronomical Image Processing, ed. Gendler R, The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series, pp. 97–113. Springer, New York, NY.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for Visual Neuroscience.

Blog post

Andrew E (2015). Why Antioxidants Might Actually Make Your Cancer Worse. IFLScience.

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office (1987). Inspectors General: Compliance With Professional Standards by the Transportation Inspector General. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Munn JE (2017). Information Technology Certification Training Implementation: Exploratory Case Study of Air Force and Civilian Leaders Experiences (Doctoral dissertation thesis). University of Phoenix, Phoenix, AZ.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Crow K (2003). Glittering Prizes. New York Times141.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by name and year in parentheses:

This sentence cites one reference (Rotblat, 2000).
This sentence cites two references (Rotblat, 2000; Gano & Kinzler, 2011).

Here are examples of in-text citations with multiple authors:

Two authors: (Gano & Kinzler, 2011)
Three or more authors: (Kaina et al., 2014)

About the journal

Full journal title	Visual Neuroscience
Abbreviation	Vis. Neurosci.
ISSN (print)	0952-5238
ISSN (online)	1469-8714
Scope	Physiology Sensory Systems

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